vegansaurus!

Road Trip: Sweet Cakes

All I’ve wanted for a week, or I don’t know, a while, has been to make the banana bread in The Joy of Vegan Baking. (Here is a tip: toast nuts before you bake with them for richer and fuller flavors.) Then I made it on Saturday and the batter was delicious as ever but the bread turned out…not the way I wanted it to. Worse, the next day when I gave it a light toast and a healthy coat of Earth Balance, it didn’t taste any better.  And what, I ask, is the point of adapting a muffin recipe into breakfast bread if you can’t improve on its flavors by toasting and buttering as it goes stale? No point, is the answer. NO POINT. Instead there is anger, and indigestion.

But I was going to tell you about Sweet Cakes, the nicest bakery in the Midwest. What a delightful oasis. We came in all gross and tired in the muggy late afternoon, and asked about the vegan baked goods. The owner/baker/smiling lady pointed them out to us, noting that she was almost out of cupcakes, and the only vegan ones left were one mini-pink lemonade, and one mini-strawberry.  We also got a vegan lemon drop cookie, and a slice of vegan chocolate cherry bread. I had an iced coffee, and Joel had a lemonade. All of that cost something like $11.50, it was ridiculous. Chicago, I don’t understand you. How are your foodstuffs so inexpensive? I am here paying that much for one drink at Beretta like a sucker, all $3.50 cupcakes and $3 donuts out of my unemployed price range, and Chicago is renting luxury apartments for a hair more than I pay for no views, on-corner shootings, and single-pane windows whose frames have been painted over so many times that you have to have super-human strength to open and close them. In Chicago, apparently, you celebrate summer and pay next to nothing for A-Number 1 vegan baked goods and probably cakes never burn and your quickbreads are always perfect balances of practical and dessertful.

Genius coffee bar item: simple syrup! Because sugar crystals do not dissolve in cold drinks! How smart. The coffee was very good as well. The lemonade was out of control, I have dreamed of lemonade this good but never before been so lucky as to taste it.

The cupcakes were excellent, the cookie was good, but the chocolate cherry bread was outstanding. If you bought two pieces, you could take one home, and have it for breakfast the next morning, lightly toasted and spread with Earth Balance. I would’ve done so at the time, had I been thinking, but I believe I was overcome by the entire experience and unable to think clearly about future baked-goods eating opportunities. Now, alone but for my insufficient banana bread, I think on Sweet Cakes and am wistful. Would that we had such a bakery.